I have received quite a few requests to make the Orion MKII card available, since the card puts out 2W it is especially attractive to those who are home brewing LDMOS amplifiers, we have made huge improvements in both Receiver and transmit performance with this board which has taken over two years to develop,

The challenge with doing so is the enormous amount of support we have had to provide in the past, there is also the matter of a specific user guide for the board.

I wanted to gauge the interest level before committing, the pricing will be dependent on the number of people interested as we will do a separate production run for this. you can expect it to be close to the $1695-1795 mark.

The other request for a specific housing for the card can be looked at if we have fair interest,

As with the previous boards the card will come with a 90 day limited hardware warranty against manufacturing defects.

You may already have found out the size of the board is 160mm x 160mm but thought I'd mention it if not. Found it on the Apache web site.

I ordered the board Tuesday from Apache-Labs and it will be here Wednesday. I have a couple of different ideas for its use; one being a replacement for my 200D board to test it out but I really want to build it into an old Icom 756 I have that died a long time ago. I intend to use the old chassis, front panel (interfaced with an arduino to issue CAT commands to the board from button/knob interactions), PA and low pass filter that are still good from the old radio. I already have a new color display mounted in the 756 panel that fits nicely. Lots of work to get this working though thus the first thing I'll do is put it in the 200D while working on the 756 interface.

I'm hoping it will come with enough documentation (at least identification of all pinouts) to allow me to properly interface it. If not, that would be a serious problem!